The Fijians Part 23

Until within the last few years there were three leper stones on the river island of Tonga near the mouth of the Rewa river. One, called Katalewe, was vested in a family called Navokai, now living at Navasa village, but formerly of Nankavoka (the Skull), a deserted entrenchment that lies back from the river-bank behind the present site of Mbulu village. Two miles distant is a second stone, called Toralangi, who is said to be still _in situ_, though Dr. Corney did not actually see him.

The third stone, known as Ratu, was missing from his former position, the cleft between two b.u.t.tresses of a _ndawa_ tree, and, although to the consternation of the native bystanders Dr. Corney was bold enough to dig up the ground in the hope of unearthing him, he was not to be found.

This is the less to be regretted since Ratu was a peculiarly active little stone. When the Notho warriors were storming Nankavoka village, one of them unwittingly dropped his _masi_, which lighted upon Ratu. It is said that he became a leper in consequence. The leper woman Mereani, wife of the chief of Navasa, who had her plantation within a few yards of Ratu, is said to have acquired the disease by working in his neighbourhood.

Katalewe was described to Dr. Corney as having been (for he exists no more) "about the size of a large orange or small shaddock, very round and smooth, ash-coloured, h.o.m.ogeneous in substance, and unlike any other stones in the neighbourhood," which, being soft alluvium deposited on old mangrove swamps, is singularly free from stones. So potent was he that the creeping stems of plants withered or turned aside as soon as they came within the radius of his poison, and a patch of ground surrounding him, about the size of a sponge-bath, was always dest.i.tute of vegetation. None knew whence he came. As long as tradition ran he had been vested in the Navokai family, now extinct but for Karolaini, a married woman about forty years of age, living at Lukia. This woman told Dr. Corney that her father, Totokea, long since dead, was a leper, and that she developed the disease in childhood. She had lost all the phalanges of three of the toes of her left foot, and had besides an extensive patch of anaesthetic skin on the right thigh. A "wise woman" of Bureitu had treated her for leprosy, and she had observed tabus on and off for some years. By the time she was old enough to marry the disease had ceased to make any advance; the stumps of the toes were healed; she could walk without lameness; and the patch on the thigh had begun to regain its natural colour. After marriage there was no return of the disease. Dr. Corney examined her, and found sensation to be perfect all over the patch, and the left foot perfectly sound except for the loss of the toes. She was quite convinced that her leprosy was hereditary, and did not result from contagion, and that she would have died of it but for the ministrations of the "wise woman" of Bureitu. She had two children (the eldest about nine when Dr. Corney saw them), and both were healthy.

[Pageheader: THE CURSE OF KATALEWE]

Katalewe's owner (_taukei ni vatu_), that is to say, the senior member of the Navokai family, could harness the power of the stone to his own needs if he had an enemy to injure, or to his own profit if other people had enemies and were willing to pay for his services. It was not necessary that the doomed person should himself be made to touch Katalewe; it was enough if the victim's clothing, or hair, or sc.r.a.ps of food he had been eating were laid against the stone with suitable prayers by the _taukei ni vatu_. The victim would then develop leprosy, but the mode of operation was not the same with all the leprosy stones, as will presently appear. It remains to relate the fate of Katalewe, who has now lost all power to harm. There came to Mbulu a pious enthusiast to represent the Wesleyan Church, a certain Sayasi, a native of another village. "Hors de l'eglise; point de salut," was his motto, and, Katalewe's natural protectors having died out in the direct line, he laid violent hands upon the unprotected stone, and carried him home in derision for his wife to use like a paper-weight for keeping down the mats she was plaiting. When not in use he was thrown with the other weights into the fire hearth, where he fell a prey to the consuming element and crumbled away to powder among the yam-pots. He did not leave the indignity unpunished. The poor iconoclast not long afterwards had his mind racked by the indiscretions of his wife, divorced her, and found himself ostracized by his fellow-pastors in consequence, and finally, a broken man, he relinquished his cure, and returned to his native village, where death soon afterwards put an end to his sufferings. From this tragic story one fact is patent--that Katalewe was made of limestone, and since there are but two kinds of limestone in Fiji, coral and dolomite, and coral would have been immediately recognized by the people of Tonga village, it is evident that Katalewe must have been a fragment of dolomite washed down from the head-waters of the Rewa river, and polished smooth by the action of the water. A stone so unusual in the delta would naturally be an object of remark; it might be taken to decorate the grave of a dead leper, and, when time had obliterated all other traces of the grave, tradition would still cling about the stone--the one feature of the forgotten grave that would survive to catch the eye of successive generations. As the graves of ancestors are the vested property of their descendants, so the leper stone, and together with the Djinn that was believed to inhabit it, would belong to the seed of the original leper for ever.

In Noikoro, near the chief village of Korolevu, almost in the centre of the great island of Vitilevu, Dr. Corney found another leprosy stone, called simply Na Vatu-ni-Sakuka (the Leper-stone), a large basaltic rock having upon it natural markings in which the natives see a resemblance to the leprous _maculae_ on the human skin. Among the Vunavunga people to whom it belonged, and who formerly lived near to it, there are several bad cases of leprosy. The stone was vested formerly in one Mbativusi (Cat-tooth), a leper, but on his death it pa.s.sed into the hands of Rasambasamba, his _vasu_, _e.g._ a man whose mother belonged to Mbativusi's family, and to his children. Their family is called Nakavindi, and the elder of the Nakavindi family, being _ex officio_ proprietor of the stone, is held to have the power of conferring leprosy upon whom he wishes. His dreadful powers are, of course, invoked secretly: the offended person comes to him with a root of _yankona_, whale's teeth, bark-cloth, or mats, praying him to impart the disease to his enemy. The leper-priest lays them on the stone with incantations (_veivatonaki_) for a successful issue. Then, returning home, he drinks _yankona_, and in blowing the dregs from his lips and moustache, cries as his toast--"_Phya! Uthu i au!_" which, being interpreted, is "Phya!

May his face be as mine!" _i.e._ leprous; and speculation would run high as to who was the object of the curse. When the curse failed there was, as in all similar public impositions, an easy way out. No doubt Elijah slew the priests of Baal because he knew that in five minutes they would have been ready with a plausible excuse for their failure to call down fire from heaven. The leper-priest could always plead the inadequacy of the offering (which, of course, became his perquisite), and ask for more, or decline to make a second trial. All the leading men of the Nakavindi family, which, be it remembered, is only a collateral branch of the original proprietors of the stone, have leprosy in its most terrible form.

Dr. Corney found another leper stone lying in the silt of a small stream, Nasova creek, about a mile and a half from the village of Nankia, in the Sawakasa district. Part of its surface was rough, and the smooth portion was interrupted with three ripplings or corrugations which the natives called _vakalawarikoso_. The village where the family to which the stone belonged was living proved to be a leprous centre from which the disease appeared to be radiating to the other villages in the neighbourhood. As this stone appears to have neither history nor malign influence, it is possible that it owes its name to its macular markings and its situation near a leprous centre.

[Pageheader: A GRISLY STORY]

Near Wala, a village about three miles from Fort Carnarvon on the opposite bank of the Singatoka river, is another stone, or rather collection of stones, for they are described as forming a miniature cairn of red stones like jade. As the cairn stands within the burial-ground of part of the Wala village, it may be actually a grave.

The natives are very reticent about it; I lived for more than a year in almost daily intercourse with the Wala without hearing of it, and Dr.

Corney, who went to see it after hearing of it from the Mbuli of the district, was adroitly put off the scent by his native guides. He learned its history under somewhat dramatic circ.u.mstances. Being called one day to examine a number of native prisoners recently admitted to the prison in Suva, he found that one of four lepers among them gave Wala as his native village. With the permission of the Superintendent of Prisons, he took the young man to the hospital in order to question him at leisure, and there, with the unknown terrors of prison discipline before his eyes, his reticence gave way. The gist of his replies to Dr.

Corney's questions as taken down at the time was as follows:--"My name is Namanka; I come from Wala, but my family belongs properly to Talatala in Vaturu. They left Talatala in heathen times when Vaturu was burned out by the enemy, and took refuge at Sambeto, but my father and mother fled to the hills and settled at Wala, where we have lived ever since. I have one brother older than myself, and he, my father, and my mother are all lepers. My father was Kuruw.a.n.kato; he died a few months ago at Keyasi, whither he had gone for treatment for leprosy. His hands were withered and contracted, there were ulcers and blisters upon them, he had lost his fingers and toes, and had patches upon him that had lost all feeling. He had no brothers; I have no uncles, and no leprous relations except my father, mother and brother. My father was the first to show symptoms. This was the way of it. On a certain day, several years ago, we all went out into our plantation, and left the house empty. Not even a child was left to keep the house. I was but a small boy at the time, but I often accompanied my parents to the plantation.

When we returned in the evening we saw that the Sakuka (the Leprosy) had crossed our threshold. He had entered by the end door, and had crawled to the hearth, and there in the ashes of the hearth we saw the prints of his hands and his feet, the prints of leper hands (_mains-en-griffe_) and toeless feet like hoofs. Thus we knew that the Sakuka had put his mark upon our house, and wondered which of us was to be the first. We knew that we should be lepers, being thus marked for it by the Sakuka, and my father was the first, my mother next, and I was last of all. The Sakuka is a stone, red like a patch of leprosy, red like red paint. It is in five or six pieces, heaped together. Sometimes a piece is missing from its place at Navau. I have been at the burial-ground myself when a piece was missing, and have seen that it was so. Vasukeyasi is proprietor of the stone; he is not a leper, but Kaliova, who also has a vested right in it, is. Vasukeyasi is priest of the stone, and he can move it to infect a person with leprosy, and so compa.s.s his death. I do not know what forms or ceremonies he uses when he would do this, but it is a sort of _kaitha_ (witchcraft). When I said that the Sakuka marked our hearth I meant the spirit of the stone which is obedient to Vasukeyasi. The thing is true; there is no doubt about it. I do not know the origin of the stone; it is an ancient inst.i.tution. I have told you all that I know about it."

In this grisly story we have the essence of the belief in leper stones.

The cairn of strange red stones set up in a burial-ground can be none other than a tomb, probably the tomb of a leper. The spirit of the dead man haunts the site of the grave, and his eldest descendant is his priest. His priest can conjure him forth in corporeal shape to crawl into the house of a person whom he has foredoomed to leprosy. This, of course, is no explanation of the _main-en-griffe_ in the ashes on the hearth. That episode may have been a coincidence or it may have been a lie; but that a family of healthy aliens came to live in the neighbourhood of a leper stone, and were infected one after the other by means which every native believed to be the malignant ministrations of the priest, was indubitable fact. And if we smile at his theory of infection, let us remember that it is logical reasoning as compared with our own in his eyes, and that he can point to more lepers in support of his plan of infection by incantation than we can adduce as the result of inoculation with the _bacillus leprae_.

Dr. Corney heard of two other leper stones--one at Navitiviti in the Mbure district, Ra province; the other near Mbukuya, fifteen miles north of Fort Carnarvon. There may be others in Vanualevu and elsewhere.

[Pageheader: DROPSY STONES]

Two instances of stones sacred to other diseases have been met with by Dr. Corney. One of these is situated near Narokovuaka, on the Wainimbuka branch of the Rewa river, and the other in the Tonga district, the home of Katalewe, the leper stone. They are both called _vatu-ni-bukete-vatu_ (dropsy stones). Abdominal dropsy is generally termed _mbukete wai_ (water pregnancy), but when very tense it becomes _mbukete vatu_ (stone pregnancy). The latter term is also applied to abdominal tumour, which, though a rare disease among the Fijians, is occasionally met with. In neither case does the stone appear to take an active part in imparting the disease to which it is sacred. Probably it was the menhir of some chief who died of the disease, or some fancied similarity to the symptoms of the disease was noticed in its shape.

It must not be supposed that the natives as a whole have as matured a theory to account for the dissemination of disease as might be gathered from the foregoing account of the leper stones. Few of them have turned their thoughts to the subject; even the youth who described the visit of the "Sakuka" had not speculated upon what motive the proprietor of the stone could have had in letting loose his horrible familiar upon the unoffending family. His reasoning went no further than this: that they had leprosy, and he supposed that it was the leper stone that did it. It was only when Dr. Corney asked the question that the youth remembered that the leper-priest had the power of conferring the disease, and that he thought of connecting the fact with his own case. So with the doom that overtook the iconoclast teacher; the natives related his destruction of Katalewe and his subsequent fate as totally unconnected episodes. The occult powers of Katalewe were so much a commonplace of their lives that, when Dr. Corney translated his notes to them, they were astonished that any one should think it worth while to collect the scattered fragments of information they had given him into a connected narrative.

It is, therefore, scarcely correct to say that they hold decided views upon the manner in which leprosy is transmitted. Most of them would say that they had never thought about it, and if pressed for an opinion, would point to its prevalence in certain families as a reason for thinking it hereditary. Natives of places where there are leper stones believe it to be the heirloom of the family connected with the stone, or the work of the leper-priest when the disease appears in other families for the first time. But among the coast tribes there seems to be a strong suspicion that lepers breed contagion, since in many districts lepers are compelled to live by themselves in the bush. This has long been the belief of the Tongans, and it is possible that Tongan immigrants have impressed their views upon Fijians, since it is more marked in the Lau Islands, where the Tongan influence is strongest.

A painful case came to my notice in 1887 at Lakemba. A leper had been driven out into the bush, and his wife had been in the habit of taking food to him daily. Her relations, having failed to dissuade her from what they regarded as a practice dangerous to themselves, told her at last that she must choose between their society and his, for that if she persisted in visiting a leper, she would be debarred from ever returning to the village, but must live thenceforth in the woods like a wild animal. The poor woman refused to abandon her husband, and the relations came to me to ask whether she could not be legally restrained from thus cutting herself off from all that makes life worth living to a native.

She was brought before me, and as soon as I had satisfied myself that she was acting of her own free-will I forbade any one to interfere with her liberty of action. The husband was described as suffering from nodular leprosy. He had been isolated, not from horror at his appearance, for men afflicted with lupus in as revolting a form were allowed to live in the village, but from fear of contagion.

In places where isolation is usual lepers conceal their condition as long as possible, and it is not uncommon to hear that so-and-so is strongly suspected of leprosy because he will never take off his s.h.i.+rt to work, and avoids bathing in company.

[Pageheader: LEPERS IN ISOLATION]

There are, as most people know, two kinds of leprosy, nerve and nodular. Nerve leprosy is manifested by patches of discoloration on the skin in which all sensation is destroyed, and the Fijians suffer so much from scrofulous affections that this symptom may be easily pa.s.sed over.

Nor is nerve leprosy, at any rate in its early stages, revolting in appearance. Nodular leprosy, on the other hand, which often attacks the face, and is far more horrible in appearance, is unmistakable, but it is less common in Fiji than nerve leprosy or a mixture of the two.

The isolation enforced by the Fijians appears to correspond with the practice of the Hebrews and Philistines, who drove the pauper lepers without the city gate, but let the high-born leper alone. Ratu Joseva, Thakombau's son, like Naaman, still maintained a household of retainers.

The lot of the isolated leper in Fiji is not a very hard one while he has strength to move about. A hut is built for him in the bush; firewood is abundant; wild yams are to be had for the digging, wild fowls and pigs for the trapping; he can pick the best land for his plantation. But when the poor wretch loses the use of his legs an awful fate may await him. A horrible story is told of a leper on the Tailevu coast who had lost all sensation in his feet. Waking by his fire one morning he noticed a smell of roasting flesh, and wondered for some moments whence it came, until, when he moved himself to look out of the doorway, he noticed that the logs in the fire-place stirred, and saw that his own feet had been lying in the fire, and were burned to cinders.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 95: The greater part of this chapter is drawn from an able paper contributed to the _Folklore Journal_, 1895, by Dr. Bolton G.

Corney, Chief Medical Officer of Fiji, who has made a special study of the subject.]

[Footnote 96: White.]

[Footnote 97: Manson, _Tropical Diseases_.]

[Footnote 98: _Voyage aux iles du Grand Ocean_, par. J. A. Moerenhout.

(Vol. ii, p. 156.) Paris, 1837.]

CHAPTER XVIII

YAWS (_Thoko_)

While the decay of custom has been hastened by the introduction of new diseases, it has not been accompanied by any attempt to eradicate the old.

Chief among indigenous diseases (if diseases introduced before contact with foreigners may be called indigenous) is yaws, called by the Fijians _thoko_, or by its Malayo-Polynesian name--_tona_, and by various dialectic modifications of that word, which is also used in Tonga, Samoa, Tahiti, and many other Polynesian islands.

The disease is but little known to the medical profession in Europe, either in practice or in medical literature. Its medical designation is _Framboesia_, so called from the strawberry-like eruptions that accompany it. By the French it is called "Le Pian." In Great Britain it is now extinct, but in the Hebrides and in the south-west counties of Scotland it was met with under the name of "sibbens," or "sivvens," as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century.

[Pageheader: THE SYMPTOMS]

It is common throughout Africa, Malaysia and Polynesia. Being contagious, it was carried by means of the slave traffic from Africa to tropical America and the West Indian Islands. From the east coast of Africa and Madagascar, about 340 years ago, the Dutch or Portuguese traders carried it to Ceylon, where it still bears the name of "Parangi Lede" or "Foreigners' evil." Hamilton noticed it in Timor in 1791, saying "it seldom terminates fatally and only seizes them once in their lives."[99] Crawfurd, who wrote in 1811-1817, noticed it in Java. Dr.

Martin, the able editor of _Mariner's Account of the Tonga Islands_, writing in 1810, was the first to recognize the ident.i.ty of _tona_ with yaws, though he never saw the disease. But the existence of _tona_ was recognized by Captain Cook and numerous other visitors to the South Seas during the last and the beginning of the present century, though they were not aware of its real nature.

The premonitory symptoms of yaws are, as a rule, insignificant and obscure; the appearance of one of the sores is generally the earliest indication that a child is infected, but adults have noticed pains in the limbs, fever, restlessness, or languor. The first sore, called the _tina-ni-thoko_, or mother-yaw, is usually a large one about half-an-inch to an inch in extent, and is often surrounded by a group of smaller sores. It generally appears on the site of some wound or scratch, more often about the lips. Those that follow are generally developed upon some part of the body where the skin is delicate, such as the neck, the groin, or the axillae, or in parts where the true skin joins the mucous membrane. Doubtless the lips of children are first infected owing to the child's habit of putting the hands to the mouth, the hand being the part most likely to come in contact with the virus of another child.

After an uncertain interval a crop of pabules, or in some cases blebs, begin to appear, the face and the parts already mentioned being their favourite point of appearance. If the eruption begins with blebs the case is spoken of as _thoko se ni niu_ (cocoanut flower _thoko_, from the resemblance of the eruption to a spray of the unexpanded flowers of the palm).

In the next stage a soft warty excrescence, which is the matrix of the sore, pushes its way through the true skin by forcing it aside rather than breaking down its substance. On reaching the surface the granulations which form this out-growth exude a fluid which is highly contagious. It forms in time a crust or scab, the reddish appearance of which is very characteristic of the yaws eruption. If this be removed by means of oil or a poultice, the granulated surface of the sore beneath it has that resemblance to a raspberry or mulberry which has given the name of _Framboesia_ to the disease. In some cases the crust a.s.sumes a curvilinear outline, recalling the appearance of the well-known Pharaoh's serpent. These are especially seen about the corners of the mouth, the neck and the axillae, and const.i.tute the _thoko ndina_ or true yaws. In other cases they retain a circular shape on all parts of the body, and are then called _thoko mbulewa_ or b.u.t.ton or limpet yaws.

During the healing process they become converted into annular or horse-shoe patterns, the centre receding before the periphery.

The sores may remain for two weeks or they may persist for fully two years. Throughout the progress of the case they may number anything from one to several hundred. The commonest number is from six to twenty or thirty. Weakly and ill-nourished children take the disease more easily than strong ones. While the active symptoms seldom last for more than two months, the dormant features last much longer, and some of the tertiary consequences may appear at almost any age.

The chief ill effects from _thoko_ are dysentery, diarrhoea, and marasmus; sometimes the joints are implicated, even the larger ones, such as the wrists, knees and ankles, and partial paralysis may follow; pot-belly is a frequent concomitant, and _tabes mesenterica_ are believed to follow it. In a later period of life the feet of those who have had yaws as children become affected by the disease, and on account of the thick and h.o.r.n.y skin by which the soles of shoeless races are protected the extrusion of the growing yaw through the sole becomes an acutely painful process. Not only do the typical granulations known as _suthuvi_ and _soki_ force their way through the skin, but the sole is also liable to a cracking and peeling form of excoriation called _kakatha_, which is nearly as painful and is also said to be contagious.

The Fijians do not recognize the connection between any of the sequelae of yaws and the original disease, and hence perhaps the indifference with which they regard it.

[Pageheader: MODE OF INOCULATION]

An idea of the serious nature of yaws may be gathered from the cases in which it has been contracted by adult Europeans. Such cases have been numerous enough in Fiji to impress the European settlers with dread and disgust. In most of these cases the disease has permanently shattered the health of the person attacked, its tertiary effects simulating those of neglected syphilis, for, while no less severe, they have proved quite as ineradicable. They are shown in permanent impairment of the digestive functions, emaciation, inflammation of the bones or joints, intractable ulceration, and marked const.i.tutional weakness, thus producing liability to other diseases such as diarrhoea, dysentery and pneumonia, and not infrequently ending in death. From this it may be readily imagined that the consequence of yaws to native children can be anything but trivial.

With Europeans as well as with natives an attack is more likely to pa.s.s off easily when contracted in childhood than when taken in adult life.

The most favourable age for getting over it safely seems to be between two and three years.

Yaws is communicated by the inoculation of virus from one of its characteristic raspberry-like sores to the abraded surface of the skin of another person. But, though the natives have never discovered this for themselves, they do not, as in other diseases, attempt to explain yaws as the work of a malignant spirit. The fact is that they scarcely believe yaws to be a disease at all. They think that if a child makes a good recovery it becomes more plump and healthy than one who has never had the disease. Mothers are pleased when the first symptoms make their appearance, regarding it as the best thing that could happen to their children to set them on the high road to a vigorous manhood, provided that the disease is not contracted at too early an age. At Mbau, however, the chief women appear always to have recognized the contagious nature of yaws. They say that in former time the children of high rank were not allowed to enter the houses of common people or play with their children, and in consequence of this exclusiveness they seldom contracted yaws until they were of an age to resist its ravages. Thus some escaped it altogether, and the majority had it very mildly. Andi Alisi and Andi Ana are cases in point, so were the late Andi Kuila and Ratu Joseva. Now-a-days there is scarcely an exception to the rule that every Fijian child contracts yaws. Whatever may have been the case formerly, it is now quite common for children to contract the disease while suckling and teething; not infrequently before they can crawl, and even at as early an age as three or four months. When this happens the eruption sometimes recedes prematurely; this is the only danger feared by the natives, who usually attribute the recedence to _ndambe_, _i.e._ incontinence on the part of the parents, or to _ramusu_ (internal injury). When the eruption recedes, as it undoubtedly does in some cases, the child becomes sickly and feverish and subject to diarrhoea, and whether these symptoms be spontaneous or secondary, death is more often the result in these cases than in others. The native treatment is purely empirical: native drugs are administered in the expectation of causing the eruption to reappear, but if the attack pursues its normal course no attempt is made to heal the eruption; on the contrary, it is intentionally abandoned to the chances of easy and plentiful development. In very severe cases natives have occasionally made application to the European medical officers; but, as a rule, it is only when the eruption has almost disappeared, and only one or two of the sores persist, that the Fijian mother will allow any interference with it. The usual native treatment in such cases is to apply a poultice of the leaves of the _lewe ni sau_, or some other native herb. The more modern practice is to heat a piece of rusty hoop iron red hot and to rub a cut lemon on it, and then to apply the rust-stained juice as a mild escharotic. It is said that in West Africa the natives use a decoction of iron filings in lemon juice, with the addition of ants and a portion of the pepper plant for the same purpose. As the old Fijians had no metals, it is possible that they have learnt the recipe from Europeans who have read of it.